The 1918 Representation of the People Act, which received Royal Assent on 6 February of that year, granted the vote to women over the age of 30 who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, and graduates of British universities. This covered about 8.4 million women. In the general election of December 1918, Lloyd George's Coalition government was returned to power by a landslide.
In November 1918, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 was passed, allowing women to be elected to the House of Commons. Several women stood for election to the House of Commons in the 1918 General Election, but only one – Constance Markievicz, the Sinn Féin candidate for Dublin St. Patrick's – was elected; and she did not take her seat, in observance of her party's abstentionist policy. She sat instead in the Dáil Éireann (the 'First Dáil') in Dublin. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Nancy Astor, who was elected as a Coalition Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton on 28 November 1919 and took her seat three days later (1 December 1919).
As Members of Parliament, women also had the right to become government ministers. The first woman cabinet minister and Privy Council member was Margaret Bondfield, who was appointed Minister of Labour by Ramsay MacDonald on 8 June 1929. In 1931, as the costs of unemployment benefit mounted, her willingness to contemplate cuts alienated her from much of the Labour movement, but while she expressed "deep sympathy and admiration" for Ramsay MacDonald when he was forced to form an emergency National Coalition with the Conservatives and Liberals (in August 1931), she chose to go into opposition along with the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
In the general election that followed on 27 October 1931, the Labour Party lost more than three–quarters of its Commons seats and was reduced to 52 members. Bondfield was defeated in her Wallsend constituency by 7,606 votes; Fran Abrams (in Freedom's Cause: Lives of the Suffragettes, 2003) observes that given the attacks on her from both right and left, "it would have been a miracle had she been re–elected". Of the former Labour cabinet members who opposed the National Government, only George Lansbury kept his seat. Lansbury would succeed Arthur Henderson (elected following the formation of the Coalition) as Leader of the Labour Party in October 1932.
Constance Markievicz was a founder member of the Fianna Fáil party in 1926, and was re–elected to the Dáil at the general election in June 1927; but she died only five weeks later, from complications related to appendicitis, without taking her seat.
Nancy Astor served in Parliament, as Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton, until 1945, when she was persuaded to step down – her sympathetic view of Nazism, which she saw as a solution to the "world problems" of Jews and Communists, having made her a liability to the Conservative Party.
In November 2019, former Prime Minister Theresa May was criticised for "[honouring] a Nazi–supporting anti–Semite" when she travelled to Plymouth to unveil a statue of Nancy Astor (celebrating the centenary of the latter's election). Nor did it escape notice that Boris Johnson, who was on the campaign trail for the following month's general election, paid a visit to the statue later the same day.
© Haydn Thompson 2020